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Motherhood, Respectability and Baby-Farming in Victorian and Edwardian London (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R3,597
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Motherhood, Respectability and Baby-Farming in Victorian and Edwardian London (Hardcover)
Series: Routledge Studies in Crime and Society
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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Motherhood, Respectability and Baby-Farming in Victorian and
Edwardian London explores a largely obscured marketplace of
motherhood that provided ways for women to manage the stigma of
illegitimacy and their respectable identities within Victorian and
Edwardian society. It focuses on the extent of women's 'dirty
work', when maternal problem management was fundamental to the
general maintenance of respectability and, by extension, to Empire
and Civilisation. Despite its intrigue, history has struggled to
understand and represent an uncomfortable but significant artefact
of Western modernising society: 'baby-farming'. During a period
when ideologies of respectability and civilisation arguably
mattered most, the 'right' kind of parenthood - especially
motherhood - became paramount. As the 'wrong' offspring could
jeopardise a woman's chances of being respectable, a wholesale,
informal, and somewhat clandestine marketplace emerged that catered
to various maternal difficulties. Within this marketplace, a
pregnancy or newborn child who may have compromised a woman's
respectability could be 'disposed' of through different means, for
a fee. From the Victorian period to the present, the commercialised
maternal practices associated with baby-farming have become firmly
established within collective consciousness as being synonymous
with child murder, female pathology, and 'infanticide for hire'.
This book provides a revised, far more complex, and nuanced
narrative history which reveals all that was associated with
baby-farming - including all possible outcomes - to be entirely
natural, rational, and even necessary products of their time; an
understandable outcome of the period's 'civilising offensive'.
Motherhood, Respectability and Baby-Farming in Victorian and
Edwardian London will be of great interest to students and scholars
of criminology, sociology, history, and gender studies.
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